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Racism over Homosexuality: My Take on the Recent Oscar Awards

The list of the winners can be found here. In general, it seemed that the theme for the Oscar nominated films these year involved sociopolitical issues

What surprised me though was Crash winning the best picture award. I thought Brokeback Mountain was going to bring home the Oscar for Best Picture. Except for Crashwhich I could only vaguely remember now, I haven’t seen any of the movies yet. I will try to see the other films nominated for Best Picture. Perhaps, Brokeback Mountain was a bit too overhyped. Also, I was expecting Felicity Huffman to win the best actess award, but Reese Witherspoon got the award instead. I enjoyed Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin’s presentation as well as Reese’s acceptance speech, which I think was heartfelt, dramatic and yet entertainingly honest.

Update + Continuation:First, there’s something wrong with WordPress again. Sigh. For some reason, the buttons on top appear to be in ‘code mode,’ meaning that clicking a button produces the ‘tags’ instead of the seeing the formated effect on the text. So know, I’m typing the html tags as I type the text. I have logged out and logged back in, and I’m still encountering the same thing. I’m hating WordPress right now.

Anyhow, back to my Oscar Awards thoughts.

As I mentioned, Crash winning the Best Picture award was quite a surprise. I think I’m not alone when I say this. People – a lot of people – really expected Brokeback Mountain to win. And when the Best Picture winner was announced, my immediate reaction was HUWAT??? Yeah, it was like when Million Dollar Baby won over the The Aviator last year or when Shakespear in Love won over Elizabeth or Saving Private Ryan a couple of years ago.

For this year’s Oscar Awards, it was not the traditional Hollywoodish films but rather, it was the sociopolitical issues of sorts. The two films contending for the Best Picture award were about these – racism and homosexuality. With respect to these two issues, and if one was to look more closely at how Americans deal with them, I’d say the acceptance of homosexuals is far less of a problem (if it can be considered a problem at all) than racism.

Brokeback Mountain’s theme is not overtly controversial anymore, yet Crash’s theme continues its subtle but relevant existence in today’s society. In the recent Academy Awards, voting for Crash over Brokeback Mountian was like saying that inequalities between races was a far larger issue that still needs to addressed. America was pretty quick in adapting the same-sex love but racism continues to be a problem challenge. And in this day and age, it’s not simply limited to ‘whites and blacks’ anymore.

As America continues to become more racially diverse with the influx of immigrants – both legal and otherwise – grows every year, dealing with the issue of racial equality (or inequality) is becoming an ever-evolving challenge for everyone.

As for the rest of the awards, I’d say that there was no single film that made hakot (that’s ‘grab’ in english)the majority of the awards. Those tiny golden statuettes were distributed quite evenly, to say the least. Heck, the ‘song’ It’s Hard out There for a Pimp from the movie Husle and Flow bagged the award for Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song).